Well, it’s been an interesting week for email. I work for quite a large organisation (4,000+ users) and one of our remote workers decided to share his frustration with a recent board decision by emailing everyone in the company. As a rule we limit the people that can send to the distribution list containing all staff in the organisation, however, we removed the limit for the number of recipients for a project we ran recently, therefore, when our remote worker found that they were unable to send to this list, they simply expanded the list and sent to the individuals instead… *sigh*

The result? A very busy Exchange organisation! In the day it was sent, there were a plethora of “Out of Office” replies, not to mention the staff that felt it would be appropriate to “Reply to All”. In fact there were in excess of one million emails generated that day, and given the amount of text contained within this message (the 4,000+ contacts) the message size was in excess of 4MB.

Now we do have some monitoring tools in place which allow us to monitor and report on the messaging environment, this revealed some interesting numbers. For example, out average message size increased by 2865% which had an excellent knock on effect for our enterprise vault.

We have resolved this in the short term by hiding this address list to ensure that staff are unable to expand the list of names, however, this doesn’t stop people from replying to the existing message. So how do we resolve this permanently? Answers on a post card. One suggestion is to use exmerge to remove the message from every mailbox.